SOURCE: Waid, Candace. “Building The House of Mirth.” In Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, pp. 160-86. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Waid traces the publication history of The House of Mirth from its origin as a serial in Scribner's magazine.

In 1902, after reading The Valley of Decision, Edith Wharton's two-volume novel set in eighteenth-century Italy, Henry James advised the beginning novelist to devote herself to “the American subject.” He insisted: “Don't pass it by—the immediate, the real, the only, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for. Do New York!” In his letter to her sister-in-law, Mary Cadwalader Jones, James warned, “she must be tethered in native pastures even if it means confining her to a backyard in New York.” As James confessed his desire “to get hold of the little...